Suggested shortnames for Silver

Up to now, we've been kind of assuming Silver (WCAG 3) will have a 
shortname patterned like WCAG 2. (The shortname is the part that appears 
after TR in the URI, sometimes collated with a date, such as 
https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/.) A couple things aren't great about this 
pattern:

  * Most W3C documents use lowercased shortnames, it's unusual to have
    an uppercase one.
  * The lack of punctuation makes it ambiguous whether the version is
    3.0 or 30.

I would like to address this by making the shortname for the Silver 
guidelines "wcag-3.0". Thus, the TR publication URI would be 
https://www.w3.org/TR/wcag-3.0/.

The Requirements document should follow a similar pattern, though in 
that case I'd like to drop the "dot" from it so it applies to all 
editions of WCAG 3. Therefore the shortname would be 
"wcag-3-requirements" and the TR publication URI 
https://www.w3.org/TR/wcag-3-requirements/.

What are your thoughts? I expect Judy and Shawn Henry not to support 
this initially, as they would probably prioritize consistency with the 
past. But I think a once-per-decade major update is the best opportunity 
to break away from that in favour of something more clear. I think the 
increased clarity outweighs consistency with the past. (N.B., we would 
probably set up redirects so if someone tries to go to 
https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG30/, they would be redirected rather than find 
it a broken link, so we're not breaking things for people used to the 
old pattern.)

Michael

Received on Wednesday, 4 November 2020 12:58:07 UTC